I Lost an OOH Campaign Strategy Competition
Here's what I discovered when I Sat With the loss: what went wrong, what we got right, and three lessons I'm taking into every pitch from here.
This past spring, I was part of a team of NYU SPS Integrated Marketing students who competed in the "Marketing in Motion" challenge—a multi-round competition hosted by OUTFRONT Media in partnership with NYU SPS's marketing program, where teams developed a real, transit-first campaign for a brand and pitched it to a panel of senior industry executives.
We made it to the finals. Three rounds. January through April. First round: A research-backed project pitch, then a semi-final at the NYU SPS Midtown Center, a visit to OUTFRONT offices in Manhattan to learn more about their technology, and lastly a final presentation at OUTFRONT's.
And then we lost.
I wish I could tell you I took it gracefully and immediately pivoted to lessons (and I hope it at least came across that way professionally), but I didn't. My fitness ring was flagging my heart rate before we even started presenting. I was excited. I was confident, and also madly nervous. My team and I had genuinely put our hearts into this; we killed the presentation. And when they announced the results, we weren't on the list.
I felt myself moving through the whole cocktail of pride, excitement, confusion, disappointment, and rejection—the "oh, ok, we weren't quite where we thought we were" kind of ouch that you can only feel when you work hard, and reality doesn't quite meet your expectations.
I sat with that for a bit. And when I was ready, I took a step back and asked: Can I figure out what we missed by figuring out what made the other teams stand out? After all, I'm a strategist, and failures are the biggest chance to reverse-engineer. Our team's loss was valuable data for future (potential) wins.
What We Built: Relief from the Pits of Hell for Native Deodorants
Our campaign was called Beat the Heat with Native—a transit-first, OOH-led campaign for Native Deodorant, built around one simple truth: NYC summers are the pits of hell, and Native saves you. You can check the full deck in my portfolio.
But let me back up for a second, because the campaign only makes sense if you've lived the insight.
You know the feeling. You leave the house looking good — outfit on point, hair done, ready for whatever the day is. And then summer in New York City happens to you. The sun isn't just hot, it's bouncing off every building and every surface directly at your face. You hit the subway entrance, and it gets worse. The platform is a sauna. The train is delayed—obviously. By the time you get where you're going, it doesn't matter if you were headed to a meeting, a first date, or just the bodega. The underarm situation has already made decisions for you. The underboob sweat is real. The back of your legs are sticking to the seat. Your body has started its own weather system, and nobody asked for this.
This is not a niche experience. This is every New Yorker, every summer, every year. And nobody was talking to them about it—least of all a deodorant brand—in the exact place where it was happening most.
That was our in.
And when we looked at the brand through a strategic lens, the case for Native showing up here became even clearer.
Native has real assets to work with—challenger-brand energy backed by P&G-scale distribution, a strong omnichannel presence, and a genuinely sensory product experience. You open it, you smell it, you feel the difference. That's not nothing in a category that usually competes on fear.
But the weakness we kept coming back to was this:
Native doesn't have a sufficiently sharp reason to switch.
The deodorant category has converged—everyone is claiming to be clean, everyone is claiming to be effective, and when everything says the same thing, nothing lands. Efficacy skepticism is real. People who haven't tried Native don't necessarily believe it will work as well as whatever they've been using for years. And high-visibility advertising—even great advertising—can still produce low persuasion if it doesn't crack through that skepticism in the moment that matters.
The opportunity, then, wasn't to out-shout the competition. It was to out-context them.
Turn real-life discomfort into persuasive proof. Show up with contextual relevance so precise that the message and the moment are one and the same. Give someone a reason to switch, not by telling them Native is better, but by handing them Native exactly when they need it most and letting the product make the case itself.
So that's what we built.
The (Arm) Pit Stop was our IRL anchor—a giant Native deodorant standing in the subway station, impossible to miss, stocked with samples and flanked by brand ambassadors. Scan a QR code, enter your email, and get a sample in your hand before the train pulls in. The product does the rest.
The "Feels Like" DOOH experience was the second leg—a Cards Against Humanity-style interactive unit pulling real-time temperature and humidity data from the station, with a prompt on screen: "NYC Heat feels like: ___" Voting options included things like "an underground sauna," "the gates of hell," and "a hot yoga class I didn't sign up for." Scan, vote, and get a $2 coupon delivered to your inbox.
Two tactics. One shared truth: Native showing up in the exact moment the heat was winning.
We had a phased media plan, a clear home-to-store strategy, an airtight SWOT that two judges, independently, called exceptional, and a narrative that tracked through seven campaign phases from January to October.
We were not low-effort. We were not unprepared. We were, however, beatable.
What Our OOH Campaign Strategy Got Wrong (and What I'd Do Differently)
1. Read the brief. Then read it again. Then read it one more time.
This was a transit-first, technology-forward challenge. That wasn't a footnote. That was the entire premise.
We had the technology—OUTFRONT XPress for dynamic, real-time creative; QRad for interactive; QR-enabled DOOH engagement; and a phased placement strategy across subway liveboards and station networks. But we buried it. We put it between background slides and budget justifications. We described the tech when we should have been showing it alive and breathing in front of them.
The teams that were recognized didn't just tell the room about their campaign. They walked the room through the experience they created, from the station entrance to the exit. You felt like you'd lived it.
Our campaign felt like a work commute. Theirs felt like a guided tour.
The OOH Campaign Strategy Mistake That Cost Us the Most Transit-first means the medium is the message. We treated it like a channel. They treated it like a stage.
2. In a pitch, the vision comes before the spreadsheet.
From a real agency and client perspective, rooting your idea in budget early is the responsible move. You work with what exists. You build to what's realistic. You don't pitch fantasies. For a challenge where nobody handed us a number? It made us dream smaller than we needed to.
OOH is one of the fastest-growing media channels right now—19 consecutive quarters of revenue growth, record $9.46B in 2025. The brands winning in this space are going bigger, not more conservative. The teams that were recognized pitched the vision first and figured out the money second. We did it in reverse. Our $1.23M was defensible and realistic—and it made us feel contained when we should have felt expansive.
I'm not saying budget discipline is wrong. In client work, it's everything. But context matters. When you're selling a vision, the vision has to land before the spreadsheet does. That's the order of operations I'm updating.
3. Go deep on the thing that makes you different. Not wide on everything.
We had a genuinely strong concept. The (Arm) Pit Stop was a big idea. The Cards Against Humanity mechanic was smart. The phased messaging arc (Starting the summer. Surviving the heat. Winning the sweaty battle) held up. The customer journey we built around our persona, Maya, was specific, human, and true.
Step one of the summer commute: stepping outside and instantly melting. The city heat is no joke
But we spread ourselves across too many elements instead of going deep on the one that made our campaign different. The (Arm) Pit Stop deserved to be the anchor. The OUTFRONT technology deserved the spotlight. We touched everything and drilled into nothing.
Next time, I'm starting with the big idea and building everything else around it.
Our Wins (and What I'm Holding Onto)
The strategy was sound. The narrative was cohesive. And the team dynamic was genuinely magical—the kind of collaboration I want to replicate for the rest of my career. Camilla, Faeid, Apollo, and Alyssa: everybody contributed, nobody shut down, and we showed up with full command of a room bigger than anything we'd practiced in.
The teachings from Joanne Tombrakos helped us build a powerful deck, and Professor Court Stroud helped us build the bones of the first deck and gave us the presentation fundamentals that carried us all the way into that room.
The Part That's Actually About More Than Marketing
This challenge was three rounds, multiple feedback sessions, a semi-final, and a final. The judges were senior executives who gave us real, usable, specific feedback at every stage—the kind you don't usually get outside of actual client work.
And losing shows you exactly where your blind spots are. It shows you what the room responds to versus what you thought it would respond to. It shows you that good and winning aren't always the same thing—and that knowing the difference is its own skill.
We didn't take home the trophy. But I walked out knowing exactly what I'd do differently, what I'd do again (even if it means losing, all over again), and having formed tremendous friendships.
One More Thing...
As a coach, I have to say this. For myself and for anyone reading:
We are allowed to be disappointed before we rush to validate what we did well.
The internet loves a redemption arc. It loves the pivot from "I was sad" to "but here's what I learned!" so fast you'd think the feelings were just a loading screen.
They're not. They're part of the process. Feeling the loss is what makes the lesson stick.
Skipping it is what keeps you circling the same patterns—in competitions, in projects, in life.
Feel it. Then move and learn from it.
Where Theory Becomes Practice
Want to see how I’m applying what I learn in this and other classes to projects and client work?
Explore my portfolio to go behind the scenes of the strategies I talk about here.
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